After a long, long wait, the English audiobook edition of Quit Your Band! is now available. Currently, it only seems to be available via Audible, but I think it's due to go up on iTunes soon.

I narrated the book myself, which was a painful experience, although it helped me pick up on dozens of spelling and grammar errors that can hopefully now be fixed in subsequent print batches and
Kindle updates. It was also cheaper to do it that way, and since I'm reliably informed that I have a voice like a late-night radio DJ, I'm sure it will be a pleasant experience for everyone.

It also features an exclusive mix/sampler with 70 minutes of music from Call And Response Records at the end, quite a lot of which is relevant in some way to the book. I posted a track list
over on the Call And
Response website, so go check it out (and investigate the brilliant bands) over there now, why don'tcha.

In addition to occasional writing gigs, and despite Quit Your Band! fading into the past in both Japanese and English editions, I've been featured in a few different things as well over
the past few months, in my capacity as a journalist and as a general Tokyo indie scene face. I'll put some links and explanations below:

(1) The Barbican in London asked me to write an article for them on Japanese underground music for a series of concerts they were doing, but in addition to the article, they also interviewed me
for their podcast, as the third part in a series focusing on different decades of Japanese music. I got the 1990s as my decade, which is definitely the place I feel most comfortable, as it
allowed me to rattle off some awesome tracks by OOIOO, Otomo Yoshihide, the always wonderful Melt-Banana and more. You can listen to it and see the track list here.

(2) Interview with JRock News website, mostly focused on Call And Response Records and the indie music scene in Japan at the moment. You can read it here. It's always interesting to be on the other side of an interview after having spent so much time
being the one asking the questions. It often makes me realise how scattershot and meandering my interviews are.

(3) Appearance on Got Faded Japan podcast. You can listen to the whole thing here. A very different kind of interview, carried out with the assistance
of a couple of beers by two American men. No idea how this comes across, since I never listen to things where my own voice is going to be played back at me, but I remember it being fun.

While this site has been quiet, there has nonetheless been a fair amount going on (follow me on
Twitter to get news as it comes in, in among the occasional 2AM political rant). I've written a few articles. Here's a summary:

First up, articles I've had published:

(1) Interview with Jim O'Rourke for Japan's ele-king magazine, about his new album Sleep Like it's Winter. The English edition is here and the Japanese version here. I was very nervous about this because Jim is such a deeply knowledgeable musician that I knew I'd struggle to keep up with him. In the
end, we had a long and very interesting conversation (that, yes, I struggled to keep up with) and even this long interview feature is a heavily edited version.

(2) Interview with Laetitia Sadier, again for ele-king, this time for a feature in the paper edition of the magazine focusing on avant-pop. The English version of the interview is online here, and the Japanese version is in the print magazine. This was another very
interesting interview, and again the version available here unfortunately had to be edited down considerably from the full text. It was interesting to me that, in interviewing Laetitia and Jim so
close together, I'd been able to speak at length with two of the people behind one of my favourite albums of all time, Stereolab's Sound Dust.

(3) Feature on Japanese underground music for The Barbican in London, available to read online here. Published to coincide with a series of performances by Japanese composers and musicians including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono,
Yasuaki Shimizu and Ryoji Ikeda, The barbican asked me to write a piece explaining the history of Japanese experimental and underground music. Obviously that's a vast topic, so I was only
able to skate the surface, but in a way that was a relief, as it's a music world populated by intensely dedicated fans who would no doubt be able to pull apart any deeper discussion I ventured to
offer with vicious glee. As a summary, there's stuff to disagree with, but I think it holds up pretty well.

(4) Feature on the process of releasing Quit Your Band! first in English and then in Japanese, commissioned by NPR in America. A long article that you can read here. This one was something that took a long time to come to fruition, and
was an extremely interesting and quite enjoyable process, going backwards and forwards with editor Andrew Flanagan, who was very patient with me in shepherding the article through to completion.
It ended up being quite personal, and in the context of trying to find a voice for my second book, I think it was a very important piece for me to have written.

(5) As a companion to the NPR piece, I also made a DJ mix of Japanese underground music that either came out from my Call And Response label or was released by people around me who inspired me in
the process of running my label and events. You can read my explanation and listen to the mix here.

Last week, on the one year anniversary of the English edition’s release, the Japanese translation of Quit Your Band! came out, with the title バンドやめようぜ！ ("Band Yameyouze!”)

It’s an interesting choice for a title in that it works as a more or less direct translation of the English, albeit phrased more as a call to arms than an instruction, while at the same time it’s
a play on “Band Yarouze!”, which is either a Japanese TV show, video game or both. That title alone seems to have done a lot to gather interest in the book in advance of the release, and judging
from the chatter online since the release, that interest seems to be spilling over into the book itself.

Obviously when writing it I had to be aware of two different audiences it would reach, each with different backgrounds of knowledge and different conceptions of my role as a commentator. To
English-speaking audiences, my value as a commentator is as an insider, while to Japanese audiences, what they want from me is an outsider’s perspective. Of course I’m both, and that was
something I had to take into account during the writing process. An interesting reversal is in play in the way the translator, music journalist Mariko Sakamoto, is a Japanese expat living in the
UK who made her name covering the explosion of new bands coming out of London and New York in the early 2000s, while I’m a British immigrant living in Tokyo whose reputation, such as it is, rests
on my coverage of Japanese music over the same period. Our experiences of the UK and Japan are almost exact inversions of each other, so while living in the UK probably gives her some insight
into my background, being absent from Japan over the main period the book covers means she has some sense of the audience’s position as well (the musical environment I’m describing is pretty
obscure for the most part, even to people living in Japan).

The other interesting thing about the Japanese edition and its audience is the way the publisher, big indie label P-Vine’s Ele-king Books imprint, clearly envisions a wider audience for the book
than would have been possible for the English edition (they’re looking for thousands rather than hundreds of sales). This means there are going to be people far outside the music audience I know
and recognise from my weekly gig-going who encounter the book, and they’re going to bring with them all sorts of expectations I hadn’t accounted for. This has been a source of certain anxiety for
me over the past few weeks, but it’s out in the world now, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

When writing Quit Your Band! I made a conscious decision that the book wasn't going to be a guide to the music itself so much as a book about the world musicians inhabit and the background
against which their music exists. Under this structure, the artists I talk about really function as examples for broader points I want to make about trends in music culture or aspects of how the
scene’s infrastructure work, and they fall into two main categories.

Firstly, there are the artists I encountered in the live venues of Tokyo and beyond as I navigated my own path through the music scene. This would include the bands
I have released myself through Call And Response Records, the wider pool of artists I book my events from and the even broader tapestry of artists who make up that world. Basically no one knows
who any of these bands are, and most people don’t really want to.

Secondly, there are the
artists mentioned in the book’s second part, where I discuss the historical background of Japanese
pop and rock music. This section deals with mainstream and underground music in parallel, trying to note some of their key areas of intersection, and mentioning some key acts from the immediate
postwar period through to the year 2001, when I first arrived in Japan.

A few
people have suggested that as an accompaniment to this blizzard of band names, I might put together a playlist of some kind, and I’ve put off doing this for a long time — partly through
being busy with other things, but also through embarrassment at the prospect of going through and reading the book again.

Another
problem to overcome was how to reconcile those two threads, each featuring artists of very different levels of significance, without seeming like I was dishonestly trying to exaggerate the
historical significance of bands who are really only important to me and my little world.

As a
result, it makes most sense to me to make two playlists: one for the bands who have soundtracked my life in the Japanese indie scene and one to supplement the book’s broad historical overview of
music in Japan. Since Japanese artists aren’t very well represented on streaming services, I did it on YouTube, although expect half the tracks to have been pulled by the labels within the first
few weeks of me posting this (so watch it quick!)

Anyway,
here’s the first playlist, covering the history of pop and rock. It’s broadly chronological, but broken up by themes, which often overlap. I’ll explain the structure in the track list
below.